Wednesday, August 31, 2005

"I just installed the highly-touted Google Desktop search engine because a friend of mine told me that it will change my life. It will. My computer is now running about half the speed it used to and I'm going to lose my job! I think I will now uninstall Google Desktop. [Update: Google gone. Speed back.]"

"The following government-sponsored quiz appeared in the August 21, 1953 issue of Collier's magazine as a supplement to an article about human behavior during nuclear attack. It was intended to help readers from becoming 'victims of panic.'"

"LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: 'Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad.'

I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?"

"It all started with an eBay auction for a new G4 Powerbook. My friend Cory wanted me to sell it for him just days after he bought it. Probably because he realized that, aside from looking cool, he had no real use for it. For the sake of an easy sale, I just pretended to sell it as my own, with a starting price of $1700, and the 'Buy It Now' option for $2100."

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Monday, August 22, 2005

Crazy eBay mom: "My mother is insane. Like, one of those ladies you see on the local news insane. Since it's inevitably going to come up I'll get out of the way that I am too, but at least I take a full dose of my medication. I've been meaning to make this thread for about the last year, but the longer I waited the more interesting the situation became. Also, I'm incredibly lazy. Case in point, these pictures are about three weeks old. Anyway, lets take a tour of our eBay house."

Sunday, August 21, 2005

"This street photography,this purity of approach,is potentially the most beautiful.Perhaps it is for the very reason that the photographs have no meaning,no function,no purpose to fulfill,no axe to grind,no ideology to speak of,that they please me as much as they do.It is the simplicity of the moment,the quality of the composition,which affect me.The fact that I saw something,a situation,that it moved me,that I wish to photograph it, that is enough. I take my camera everywhere because you never know when a lucky moment might happen."

"KANZAT is his special style of kargiraa khoomei. When he was a little boy he was thrown out of the choir and told never ever to sing again. So he tried playing football instead. When he realised that there was such a thing as Deep Purple and Sonic Youth, he decided to get rid of the football and get a guitar and start singing again, although the ideology department of the Communist Party didn't like it very much."

"Barry Nalebuff defends his company's tea-sweetening policies as those of an honest agent making tea in accordance with what the rational utility-maximizing choices of its principals (the tea-drinkers) would be if its pricipals thought hard about the tradeoff of sweetness of taste versus inches on the wasteline:"

Friday, August 19, 2005

"Within hours of publication, senior scientists at the Smithsonian Institution -- which has helped fund and run the journal -- lashed out at Sternberg as a shoddy scientist and a closet Bible thumper."

Thursday, August 18, 2005

"'Managed elephant populations could similarly benefit ranchers through grassland maintenance and ecotourism,' they wrote, adding that reintroducing lions would represent the pinnacle of the Pleistocene re-wilding of North America."

"It's kind of confusing, but for your blog you will need 'software,' which is a 'hi-tech' term for a thing inside the computer that keeps your blog from accidentally exploding and ruining all the wires. The key is to select the proper blogging software for your budget and level of stupidity."

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

"Everybody knows The Dukes of Hazzard is based on a popular television series of the same name. What's not generally known is that the 'original' television series was based on a 1975 movie called Moonrunners."

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

"'Well, dear friends, you know that some men can do to the glory of God what to other men would be sin. And notwithstanding what brother Pentecost has said, I intend to smoke a good cigar to the glory of God before I go to bed to-night.'"

"As if battling dragons, goblins and orcs was not enough of a challenge, avid online computer gamers now face an even scarier menace - rampant inflation.

Players who immerse themselves in the hugely popular online fantasy game EverQuest2 last week saw the price of everyday goods – like the Wand of the Living Flame and the Dark Shield of the Void – plummet after some participants discovered a way to duplicate valuable items for free."

"This is a blast from the past. I believe it actually predates my use of the phrase 'timewaster' for this sort of thing. Oldtimers will remember and curse me. Newcomers will not remember -- but will still curse me. Please do not send me your scores.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

"Carl Sagan described the theory of evolution in his final book as the doctrine that 'human beings (and all the other species) have slowly evolved by natural processes from a succession of more ancient beings with no divine intervention needed along the way.' It is the alleged absence of divine intervention throughout the history of life—the strict materialism of the orthodox theory—that explains why a great many people, only some of whom are biblical fundamentalists, think that Darwinian evolution (beyond the micro level) is basically materialistic philosophy disguised as scientific fact. Sagan himself worried about opinion polls showing that only about 10 percent of Americans believe in a strictly materialistic evolutionary process, and, as Lewontin’s anecdote concedes, some of the doubters have advanced degrees in the relevant sciences. Dissent as widespread as that must rest on something less easily remedied than mere ignorance of facts."

"In fact, there is a great deal more to the creation-evolution controversy than meets the eye, or rather than meets the carefully cultivated media stereotype of 'creationists' as Bible-quoting know-nothings who refuse to face up to the scientific evidence. The creationists may be wrong about many things, but they have at least one very important point to argue, a point that has been thoroughly obscured by all the attention paid to Noah's Flood and other side issues. What the science educators propose to teach as 'evolution,' and label as fact, is based not upon any incontrovertible empirical evidence, but upon a highly controversial philosophical presupposition. The controversy over evolution is therefore not going to go away as people become better educated on the subject. On the contrary, the more people learn about the philosophical content of what scientists are calling the 'fact of evolution,' the less they are going to like it."

"Discovery Institute's mission is to make a positive vision of the future practical. The Institute discovers and promotes ideas in the common sense tradition of representative government, the free market and individual liberty. Our mission is promoted through books, reports, legislative testimony, articles, public conferences and debates, plus media coverage and the Institute's own publications and Internet website ( http://www.discovery.org ).

Current projects explore the fields of technology, science and culture, reform of the law, national defense, the environment and the economy, the future of democratic institutions, transportation, religion and public life, government entitlement spending, foreign affairs and cooperation within the bi-national region of 'Cascadia.' The efforts of Discovery fellows and staff, headquartered in Seattle, are crucially abetted by the Institute's members, board and sponsors"

"A basic rule of Brainstorming is build onto ideas already suggested. Alex Osborn, the originator of classical brainstorming, first communicated this. A checklist was formulated as a means of transforming an existing idea into a new one. The checklist is designed to have a flexible, trial and error type of approach."

"You are probably asking yourself one (or all) of the following questions: How do I do it? What should I bring with me? What tips do you have to share with us airport sleeping newbies? Well, here are some ideas that will help you get started in your airport sleeping careers. "

"Ranch dressing has been the nation's best-selling salad topper since 1992, when it overtook Italian. How did this simple mixture of mayonnaise, buttermilk, and herbs become America's favorite way to liven up lettuce?"

Monday, August 08, 2005

"Richard I. Bong, for example, an Army Air Corps pilot who came to be known as the Ace of Aces, was sent home in December 1944 after shooting down his 40th Japanese plane. He was dispatched immediately on a nationwide tour to help sell war bonds."

"The Air France evacuation required an extraordinary degree of social coordination - which emerged among a group of strangers with virtually no time to prepare. Once out of the wreckage, they were aided by other strangers who, on the spur of the moment and with no expertise in emergency situations, had pulled off a nearby highway and calmly charged into the scene, despite the risks posed by an exploding plane."

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Friday, August 05, 2005

"So why did they laugh? Dr Morreall's thesis is that laughter, incapacitating as it can be, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed. The reaction of the psychologists, linguists, philosophers and professional clowns attending the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and Laughter illustrates his point. Dr Morreall survived to tell the tale and so had an easy time making it sound funny."

"When laymen, including conservative journalists, follow the scientific majority on a question like this, rather than the dissenting minority, they should at least be aware that they are following guides who, while claiming to be disinterested, are anything but that."

"If Johnson is going to make a leap of faith, he'd prefer it to be a religious one. 'I am a philosophical theist and a Christian,' he wrote in Darwin on Trial. 'I believe that a God exists who could create out of nothing if He wanted to do so, but who might have chosen to work through a natural evolutionary process instead.'

Darwin on Trial is not just an attack on evolution, but on the very modern principles of science. Johnson believes Galileo and his descendants worked to solve the questions of our existence based on science, not faith, but that for several centuries since then, men of reason -- astronomers, mathematicians, philosophers -- have conspired to purge God from the handiwork of the universe. By the time Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859, the fatal blow had been cast.

'The very persons who insist upon keeping religion and science separate are eager to use their science as a basis for pronouncements about religion,' he wrote. 'The literature of Darwinism is full of antitheistic conclusions, such as that the universe was not designed and has no purpose, and that we humans are the product of blind natural processes that care nothing about us.'

Johnson suggests that evolution has become a faith-based movement in its own right. He maintains that biologists have become so invested in the Darwinian worldview that they have ceased looking for contradictory evidence. 'As the creation myth of scientific naturalism, Darwinism plays an indispensable ideological role in the war against fundamentalism,' he wrote. 'For that reason, scientific organizations are devoted to protecting Darwinism rather than testing it, and the rules of scientific investigation have been shaped to help them succeed.'

Johnson regards scientists as today's reigning priesthood -- a monklike discipline that controls our culture's story of creation and prot"

"'Assuming a non-Hollerith encoding with eight bits per column, and an MP3 file encoded at 128kbps CBR, there would be 36,864 cards in that deck, and the card reader would need a throughput of 205 cards per second. It might be wise to include an 8-column sequence number, however, so that a misordered deck can be repaired by a card sorter; with 72 data columns per card, the total is precisely 40,960 cards (40K cards), requiring a 228 card/second throughput.' The 21 boxes of cards needed would by 5 feet 9 inches tall. That such a huge leap in technology is well within living memory astonishes Y."

"One day my uncle picked up a hictchiker going down Topanga Canyon Blvd. The hitchiker gave my uncle a packet containing a cd-rom video and a few pages of song lyrics and the synopsis/proposal for a movie called “Kathy and Erol”. Here is the video for your consideration"

"In most towns, a bid to change owners of a neighborhood store would stir little interest. But in Piedmont, an upscale enclave tucked in the East Bay foothills and surrounded by Oakland, it became front-page news and the buzz of the community."

Monday, August 01, 2005

"What has Congress accomplished? A pork-filled highway bill (Is there any other kind?) and an energy bill that's all subsidies plus Daylight Saving Time--everything for which there was an actual policy debate was removed as 'controversial.' Who, after all, can be against giving money to constituents?"

"And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability."

"Can it be that National Review, flagship of the modern conservative movement, is turning 50 years old? And can it be that William F. Buckley, eminence of both magazine and movement, will soon celebrate his 80th birthday? To conservatives who came of age along with National Review, both facts must seem highly improbable. It was only yesterday, after all, that Chairman Bill gaveled the ragtag national conservative meeting to order and urged it (as National Review's inaugural issue had famously instructed) to 'stand athwart history, yelling Stop.'"

"The challenges of extreme obesity don't necessarily end with death. Additional handlers are needed to transport the body. Families might have to buy extra-wide caskets or double cemetery plots. And cremating a large body is a long, meticulous process."